~ Reflections on life, for the most part in the form of book reviews

Category Archives: Fiction

I hadn’t heard of the intriguing name, Barbara Kingsolver, until a friend mentioned it in reply to a Facebook comment about the climate change marches being held by young people around the globe. The inside cover of Unsheltered promises to “give us all a closer look at those around us and perhaps ourselves” and it certainly delivered on that promise for me.

The chapters alternate between two time periods, both of which are facing a sea change. In 1871 Thatcher Greenwood, Mary Treat and Uri Carruth are a ripple, but they will become a tide. That’s why the town of Vineland and its pernicious overlord Captain Landis resists them with all of its means. Enlightenment is coming, science is revealing truths that are shaking the foundations of man’s place in the world, and while inquisitive minds embrace the new world comfortable men fear the loss of theirs.

In 2016, the world is shaking again. The American Dream is burning itself out and taking the whole planet with it. The Tavoularis family are discovering that it isn’t only the foundations of their house that are failing but all the assumptions that underpinned their lives. Grandpa Nick revels in the populist rhetoric of The Bullhorn, a rapidly rising presidential candidate, the modern day Landis promising to stem the tide and protect his subjects, just like Landis with lies and self-interest.

Parents Willa and Iano can’t understand how come they did everything they were told was right only to end up at the bottom of the heap. They worked hard, they chased the dream, but it has turned out to be hollow and the sacrifices no longer make sense. Son Zeke is dealing with grief by throwing himself into his own version of the old rules, money makes the world goes round and he’s after his share, too caught up in his own needs to see the trail he leaves behind.

Then there is Antigone. Wild Thing, I think I love you. ‘Tig’ who would cut me down in an instant because she lives what I only think about. She sees the world with such clarity, certain of its uncertainty created by the self-indulgences of her parents and grandparents assumptions that are rooted in an obsolete time. Weighing her righteous anger against a potent pragmatism and a graceful compassion.

The novel explores people in a shifting world. To use the author’s own words from an interview in the Guardian, “What do people do when it feels like they’re living through the end of the world as we know it? Because that’s what it seems like we’re doing right now, and almost nobody disagrees. And maybe people said that 10 years ago, but now they’re really saying ‘WTF?’”. It really is writing that speaks to our time and although the portents are bleak, I believe Kingsolver offers genuine hope for those who are ready to “push the fallen bricks aside and see the sky”.

I honestly cannot recommend Unsheltered enough. Read it and then pass it round or buy copies for your family and friends so that you can explore its questions together, there are no more important questions than these right now.

I have no idea why it has taken me so long to get around to reading Neil Gaiman’s work. It has always occurred to me that he would be the perfect author for me to read, his appearance, his humour, his heroes, all a great fit for me. I read Good Omens many years ago but mostly out of my love of Terry Pratchett. Why did it take me so long to make the link and dive into Gaiman’s own individual work? I’m almost embarrassed to be honest, but at least I got there in the end.

I am a great believer in stories. They infuse into our culture and as a result are incredibly powerful in shaping the way we live both individually and collectively. Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller and in Anansi Boys he explains that power as he describes the shift in ownership of our stories from Tiger, all teeth and claws hunting down its food, to Anansi, the Spider, cunning and wise.

“’Now Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. So, all over the world, all of the people, they aren’t just thinking of hunting and being hunted any more. Now they’re starting to think their way out of problems – sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they’re trying to figure out how to do it without working—and that’s the point where people start using their heads …… now people are telling Anansi stories, and they’re starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That’s when they start to make the world …… People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers …… People still have the same story, the one where they get born and they do stuff and they die, but now the story means something different to what it meant before.”

In his books Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, Yuval Noah Harari argues that it was imagination that allowed humanity to thrive in comparison to other animals, because our ability to imagine something that cannot be seen allows us to collaborate in much larger groups. This ability allowed us to mythologise and create stories that united people who had no other connection, had not even met before. We see it now in the way that shared religious beliefs allow people to come together and pool time, skills and resources in a common aim. Even shared support of the same football club has a similar effect.

The stories that we tell ourselves, and each other, really matter. The way that we talk about immigration and how we should respond to and feel about immigrants is a huge issue right now, as some sections of the media shape a whole country’s actions by telling emotive stories, even false ones. Climate Change is another subject affected by our stories. When we set ourselves as outside of nature with the Earth as a mere resource to fuel our pleasure we live out a very different reality to when we consider ourselves a part of nature, reliant upon this life-giving ecosystem for our very existence.

During the 2016 referendum on EU membership the Leave campaign told compelling stories whereas their Remain opponents mainly fell back on woolly rhetoric around fear of a possible change. In hindsight, after three shambolic years the Remain concerns look more real than the Leave stories, but Leave won (albeit narrowly). People respond to stories. The same is true at the personal level. If we tell our children that they are “good for nothing”, for example, eventually they will live like that is true. Parenting is a minefield and we tend to go into it poorly prepared, but our words shape our children’s lives.

“Fat Charlie” Nancy believes that he is the mundane half of a pair of siblings. Both born of a God, Spider seems to have inherited all the cool bits, the swagger and the charm, whereas Charlie was left with uncertainty and a lack of self-esteem. Over the course of Anansi Boys he gradually learns the truth and both he and Spider will live different lives as a result.

Think about the stories that you read, the stories you hear and, perhaps most of all, the stories that you tell. They change the world.

Synopsis

God is dead. Meet the kids.

Fat Charlie Nancy’s normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn’t know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother.

Now brother Spider’s on his doorstep — about to make Fat Charlie’s life more interesting… and a lot more dangerous.

The Author

Neil Gaiman was born in Hampshire, UK, and now lives in the United States near Minneapolis. As a child he discovered his love of books, reading, and stories, devouring the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, James Branch Cabell, Edgar Allan Poe, Michael Moorcock, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, and G.K. Chesterton. A self-described “feral child who was raised in libraries,” Gaiman credits librarians with fostering a life-long love of reading: “I wouldn’t be who I am without libraries. I was the sort of kid who devoured books, and my happiest times as a boy were when I persuaded my parents to drop me off in the local library on their way to work, and I spent the day there. I discovered that librarians actually want to help you: they taught me about interlibrary loans.”

I’ll be honest with you, I’m a fully paid up member of the David F Ross fan club and have been ever since opening up The Last Days of Disco back in late 2014. I love his brand of bittersweet humour and the relentless optimism of his down at heel characters as they suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Welcome to the Heady Heights is his fourth novel, breaking away from the Disco Days trilogy that preceded it but retaining all of their West Scotland charm. Some of the themes get pretty dark and some of the characters demonstrate traits that are all too repugnantly real, but the determined villains are offset by another ragtag of wonderful human beings kicking at the shins of life.

Archie Blunt is exactly what he thinks he is, deep down a decent guy, but he’s struggling to cope with the hand that he’s been dealt. A crap job, widower to a wife he loved but to whom he never properly expressed it, a father losing himself to dementia, struggling to hold it all together under the financial and emotional pressures of being a normal bloke in an unforgiving world.

He’s joined by Gail, a freelance journalist on the trail of justice, and Barbara, a pioneering WPC in a police station of glass ceilings and in your face prejudice, as well as a gaggle of freewheeling friends and associates catching a croggy on his ride towards fame, fortune, disappoint and redemption.

Not everyone in Archie’s story is a good guy though, some of them are downright nasty and what’s worse is they have the money and the power to get away with it. When their paths begin to cross it’s an engrossing tapestry of high jinks and belly laughs mixed with righteous anger and heart-breaking tears.

At its heart, this is a love letter to the city of Glasgow, warts and all, but it has such a big heart that it can encompass us all. It is a celebration of the struggle to live that we all face to some degree or other. Go out and buy David’s books and in doing so hopefully inspire him to write some more.

Synopsis

Archie Blunt is a man with big ideas. He just needs a break for them to be realized. In a bizarre brush with the light-entertainment business, Archie unwittingly saves the life of the UK’s top showbiz star, Hank “Heady” Hendricks, and now dreams of hitting the big-time as a Popular Music Impresario. Seizing the initiative, he creates a new singing group with five unruly working-class kids from Glasgow’s East End. Together, they make the finals of a televised Saturday-night talent show, and before they know it, fame and fortune beckon for Archie and The High Five. But there’s a complication; a trail of irate Glaswegian bookies, corrupt politicians and a determined Scottish WPC known as The Tank are all on his tail.

A hilarious, poignant nod to the elusivity of stardom, in an age when “making it” was “having it all,” Welcome to the Heady Heights is also a dark, laugh-out-loud comedy, a heartwarming tribute to the 1970s and a delicious drama about desperate men, connected by secrets and lies, by accidents of time and, most of all, the city they live in.

Author

David F. Ross was born in Glasgow in 1964 and has lived in Kilmarnock for over 30 years. He is a graduate of the Mackintosh School of Architecture at Glasgow School of Art, an architect by day, and a hilarious social media commentator, author and enabler by night. His debut novel The Last Days of Disco was shortlisted for the Authors Club Best First Novel Award, and received exceptional critical acclaim, as did the other two books in the Disco Days Trilogy: The Rise & Fall of the Miraculous Vespas and The Man Who Loved Islands.

When I pick up a thriller I am generally looking for three things, setting, characters and plot. Although this was my first Kjell Ola Dahl novel, he is of course a very well established author published in 14 countries, so it should be no surprise to find that he has command of his genre. The Courier has all three aspects, perfectly drawing both the physical and psychological landscape of wartime Norway, populating it with authentic characters and twisting through a story arc that alternates between 1942 and 1967 as he guides you to its shocking conclusion.

I was immediately drawn to The Courier when I saw its cover, it’s an evocative image and alongside the title had me keen to find out more. I’ve long been a fan of William Boyd and this felt like it might be in a similar vein to some of his work. It didn’t disappoint and if you have enjoyed novels such as Restless I feel sure you would enjoy this. Ester, the eponymous lead of the novel, has faced the cruellest of persecutions at the hand of the Nazis and it has inevitably shaped her. Her suffering is an immediate window of connection and understanding of the journey we take together in the story.

All of the characters flow in and out of your sympathies, the ambiguities of living through a war, with all of its horrors and uncertainties, blurring the lines between right and wrong and keeping the reader as much on edge about who to trust as the protagonists. This sense of how war intrudes on normal life with such intensity that it drives people’s choices and ultimately their character is stark and maybe warns against judging any individual too harshly. Yet at the ideological level, the actions of the Nazi occupiers are grotesque and soul destroying.

Despite the brutal backdrop, Dahl’s writing is absorbing and the visual descriptions envelope you in the setting, transporting you to another time like a walk down Duckett’s Passage in an episode of Goodnight Sweetheart, and the sights and sounds of occupied Norway and resistant Sweden fill your senses. This is a polished thriller, superbly translated by Don Bartlett, that has immediately put Kjell Ola Dahl onto my list of authors whose work can be trusted to deliver.

Synopsis

In 1942, Jewish courier Ester is betrayed, narrowly avoiding arrest by the Gestapo. In a great haste, she escapes to Sweden, saving herself. Her family in Oslo, however, is deported to Auschwitz. In Stockholm, Ester meets the resistance hero, Gerhard Falkum, who has left his little daughter and fled both the Germans and allegations that he murdered his wife, Åse, who helped Ester get to Sweden. Their burgeoning relationship ends abruptly when Falkum dies in a fire.

And yet, twenty-five years later, Falkum shows up in Oslo. He wants to reconnect with his daughter. But where has he been, and what is the real reason for his return? Ester stumbles across information that forces her to look closely at her past, and to revisit her war-time training to stay alive…

Written with Dahl’s trademark characterization and elegant plotting, The Courier sees the hugely respected godfather of Nordic Noir at his best, as he takes on one of the most horrific periods of modern history, in an exceptional, shocking thriller.

The Author

One of the fathers of the Nordic Noir genre, Kjell Ola Dahl was born in 1958 in Gjøvik. He made his debut in 1993, and has since published eleven novels, the most prominent of which is a series of police procedurals cum psychological thrillers (Oslo Detectives series) featuring investigators Gunnarstranda and Frølich.

In 2000 he won the Riverton Prize for The Last Fix and he won both the prestigious Brage and Riverton Prizes for The Courier in 2015.

I find myself once again sat on a bus wondering whether the other passengers have noticed the tears welling up in my eyes. Hopefully, they are too absorbed in their own thoughts, companions and mobile phones to have any time for a fellow passenger turning the pages of a book, occasionally wiping away the blurry dampness, finally closing the cover and sitting back.

Louise Beech’s first novel How to be Brave was published in 2015 and her fifth will be published in April 2019, the stories seem to flow from her but the quantity and regularity of her output in no way lessens its quality or impact. Maybe they have all been dwelling inside their author all along, jostling for position, waiting for freedom, for someone to release them from the safety of their compound into the wild.

“I had written four of my books when How to be Brave got me my book deal. I’d already written Mountain, Maria and Lion Tamer. I did edit them a lot after Brave, but they were there. Then in 2017 I wrote my fifth one, Call Me Star Girl. I guess, yes, that had been simmering there. I had for a long time thought I’d set a book in a radio station as I’ve spent a lot of time in them as guest presenter, and always thought what a claustrophobic and spooky setting it could make.”

Louise writes with such emotional integrity that her characters transcend the fiction as you share their stories, recognising their wounds in yourself and the people around you. She tells stories that break your heart, but she does it so exquisitely that you do not want her to stop, the pain paradoxically fuelling joy. Our existence is a mysterious tragedy. There is no life without death, no wonder without suffering, but when we accept our place in that cycle, somehow, we can hold the two together and live.

“Writing is healing for me. It soothes and comforts me to write. I find my own healing there. I guess I mend after a broken childhood/early adulthood. If you witness painful things, perhaps you have a natural empathy when exploring them? I do love humans. As a whole. Have great hope in them! So maybe that is why there’s always positivity there?”

And there is the crux. Hope is what sustains us and somehow when we lay ourselves bare, when we open ourselves to be vulnerable to the inescapable pain of life we find it, or at least we do if we have company. Is that ultimately our purpose? To be good companions, navigating the miracle and tragedy of being alive, together. If so, then Louise’s novels can help guide us.

“I do gravitate towards writing about pain/difficult things. I’m not afraid to explore any topic. This is why, despite jumping genres it would seem, I’m not a genre writer. I hate boundaries/rules/confines. I write what I have to. And I love every minute of it.”

The Lion Tamer Who Lost captures all of this. It is the story of Ben and Andrew, an enviable love but an impossible one.

Synopsis

Be careful what you wish for…

Long ago, Andrew made a childhood wish, and kept it in a silver box. When it finally comes true, he wishes he hadn’t.

Long ago, Ben made a promise and he had a dream: to travel to Africa to volunteer at a lion reserve. When he finally makes it, it isn’t for the reasons he imagined.

Ben and Andrew keep meeting in unexpected places, and the intense relationship that develops seems to be guided by fate. Or is it? What if the very thing that draws them together is tainted by past secrets that threaten everything?

A dark, consuming drama that shifts from Zimbabwe to England, and then back into the past, The Lion Tamer Who Lost is also a devastatingly beautiful love story, with a tragic heart.

The Author

Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow-up, The Mountain in My Shoe was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her previous books Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost were widely reviewed, critically acclaimed and number-one bestsellers on Kindle. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the RNA Most Popular Romantic Novel Award in 2019. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice. Louise lives with her husband on the outskirts of Hull, and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.

The Lion Tamer Who Lost is available now.

Thank you to Louise Beech for answering my questions for this review, included in quotation marks above.

It is nearly two years since I reviewed Six Stories, the first instalment of the series by Matt Wesolowski that follows a podcast format of six episodes to share six different perspectives on a cold police investigation. I was immediately impressed by the format, which fitted perfectly with host Scott King’s revisiting of an old, unsolved mystery, interviewing key people in each episode, shedding new light on events and uncovering old secrets.

Changeling is the third novel in the series and the format continues to work perfectly, but the emotional pull of the narrative has seen a step change. I missed Hydra, the second instalment, so I cannot say whether the trajectory has been consistent but although the original was a gripping thriller this story of the disappearance of seven-year-old Alfie Marsden is a fist around the heart, relentlessly squeezing until the final devastating release.

Alfie Marsden goes missing in Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve 1988. His parents have separated and his father breaks up an attempt at a family Christmas concerned that Alfie is no longer safe with his alcoholic mother. He pulls over on the Wentshire Forest Pass to investigate a tapping sound in the engine of his car but within a few minutes of his head being under the bonnet he finds Alfie is gone. Organised searches fail to find the lost child but his father returns to the site every year to visit a shrine and hope that his son might somehow return from the trees.

Alfie was officially declared presumed dead in 1995. A case gone cold and ideal material for Scott King to investigate, but he does so reluctantly. Something unnerves him about this particular case. Is it the strange stories about Wentshire Forest that are unsettling him or the people creeping out of the shadows, guiding him like a chess piece through a Six Stories that seems to have moved out of his control?

The picture builds throughout the episodes, which make up equally balanced chapters. You start to sense the elements that don’t quite add up, but who can you believe and how is their perception of events distorted by their perspectives? The speculation inevitably begins to take hold of you as you digest each new insight. By the time the final chapter loomed I knew what was coming but it didn’t lessen the impact at all.

Sometimes you can feel what the author has invested emotionally into their writing and this is one of those cases where it clearly mattered to Matt Wesolowski that he tell this story. It’s a book that you won’t want to put down as each episode leads a little further into a nightmare of psychological manipulation. What stays with you at the end is the people, the voices of the lives that have been affected. Good work Matt, a vital story beautifully told.

Synopsis:

On Christmas Eve in 1988, seven-year-old Alfie Marsden vanished in the dark Wentshire Forest Pass, when his father, Sorrel, stopped the car to investigate a mysterious knocking sound. No trace of the child, nor his remains, have ever been found. Alfie Marsden was declared officially dead in 1995.

Elusive online journalist, Scott King, whose ‘Six Stories’ podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the disappearance, interviewing six witnesses, including Sorrel and his ex-partner, to try to find out what really happened that fateful night. Journeying through the trees of the Wentshire Forest – a place synonymous with strange sightings, and tales of hidden folk who dwell there, he talks to a company that tried and failed to build a development in the forest, and a psychic who claims to know what happened to the little boy…

The Author:

Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- an US-based anthologies such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller.

The blog tour for Changeling featured a short interview with the author that you ca read here:

I have missed Orenda Books during my enforced sabbatical from reading and reviewing. The consistent quality of the authors is a tribute to the talent and commitment of the publisher’s driving force, Karen Sullivan. Her ability to pick a book is uncanny and most excitingly of all she has introduced me to writers I would never have found on my own. This is certainly true of German author Simone Buchholz whose novel Beton Rouge arrived last week and immediately caught my attention with its striking cover.

Short, sharp chapters rattle by in this crime novel featuring Public Prosecutor Chastity Riley. This is the second novel in the series to be translated into English, but although I came to this one without having read Blue Night, I immediately took to the character despite my lack of back story. Written in the first person the novel puts you inside Chas’s head and despite the darkness that sometimes lurks there it’s an appealing place to be. She’s intelligent, quick and engaging, whilst also being sardonic, biting and a little neurotic. I liked her a lot.

At 186 pages it’s a quick read that could be taken in one sitting, but it shouldn’t be skimmed as that could miss the opportunity for relationship. The book’s strength is that you get to inhabit Riley, her thoughts and her take on the people and events that surround her. It’s that intimacy that keeps you turning the pages and reading just one more chapter, the sense of knowing whilst wanting to learn more.

Most of the people that you meet in life are projections of something that they hope to be or think you might like to see. It’s refreshing to dwell within the blurred lines and vulnerability of another, albeit fictional, person’s reality. Very little actually resolves into a nice, neat finish either in the lives of the characters or in the case being investigated. We observe the detail of events and we participate through the thoughts of the lead protagonist, not to judge but simply to share the experience.

I didn’t need to have read Blue Night, the earlier release, to enjoy Beton Rouge but I will definitely be reaching for it now.

Synopsis:

On a warm September morning, an unconscious man is found in a cage at the entrance to the offices of one of the biggest German newspapers. Closer inspection shows he is a manager of the company, and he’s been tortured.

Three days later, another manager appears in similar circumstances.
Chastity Riley and her new colleague Ivo Stepanovic are tasked with uncovering the truth behind the attacks, an investigation that goes far beyond the revenge they first suspect … to the dubious past shared by both victims. Travelling to the south of Germany, they step into the elite world of boarding schools, where secrets are currency, and monsters are bred … monsters who will stop at nothing to protect themselves.

A smart, dark, probing thriller, full of all the hard-boiled poetry and acerbic wit of the very best noir, Beton Rouge is both a classic whodunit and a scintillating expose of society, by one of the most exciting names in crime fiction.

The Author:

Simone Buchholz is an award winning crime writer who lives in Sankt Pauli, Hamburg. I found this interview with her from the blog tour for Blue Night which gives a nice introduction to the author and her work.

I love a good thriller. I have always been a Bond fan, even though there are aspects of the books that have not aged well and of the films that are downright silly; Bourne in print enthralled me, even though the films reduced him in their retelling. Claymore Straker is up there with Bond and Bourne when it comes to sheer entertainment but he is also self-aware and multi-layered and although the violence is brutal, it is deeply rooted in story and always questioned.

Reconciliation for the Dead has Straker seeking some peace for the sins of his past, fallen friends and the country of his birth. As a young man he served in the South African army and he has been fleeing both the real and the existential threats of that service ever since, but it seems that there may be some things that the Truth and Reconciliation Council just do not want to hear.

Reading Straker’s confession to the Council whilst in the real world white supremacists barely feel the need to veil their racism, whether wielding international power or peddling hatred in the streets, made the novel’s themes all the more stark and harrowing. The setting switches between his hearing in 1996 and the events he is explaining in the early part of the 1980s. The scale of the trauma he experienced giving his listeners just enough leeway to cast doubt on his testimony, unwilling to own its meaning.

Clay’s personal journey shows simply how being born into an oppressive system blinds you to its reality. His upbringing, education and training as a soldier were all informed by a worldview that marked him out as superior and, though the apartheid government in South Africa has fallen, it cannot be denied that this remains a dominant worldview across the western world. Straker travels to the very edge of physical and mental destruction before he finally sees the truth and one wonders how far the rest of us will have to go before we can honestly say we do too.

Hardisty’s writing is utterly gripping. Within a few paragraphs, the story consumes its reader; surrounded by the vivid landscape of Africa and completely cut off from their day-to-day world, a physical effort is required to withdraw from the narrative. Now a university professor and Director of Australia’s national land, water, ecosystems and climate adaptation research programmes, his author’s bio reads like a character from his novels and it comes across in his absorbing settings and convincing narratives.

The Claymore Straker series is the full package, containing a solid core of real life moral reflection that truly enriches its adrenalin fuelled, edge of your seat entertainment. It is full blow thriller writing for the thinking reader that can only be improved by a final page confirming “Claymore Straker will return”.

If you want the executive summary Six Stories is a cracking read, just go straight out and get your hands on a copy. It has energy and tension that keeps you racing through it, but its structure also gives natural space for pause. The premise is that the story is told over the course of six podcast episodes, each of which gives a different perspective on the same event – the disappearance of a 15 year old boy and the discovery of his body a year later. As a result the book breaks up nicely into six sections that can be read as instalments or taken as a box set binge together.

It’s a structure that fits nicely with my commute. One story per bus journey, leaving a sense of what will follow that helps to build the tension, although Matt Wesolowski’s writing does that itself in reality. The podcast has a homespun feel that is reminiscent of a Blair Witch camcorder style and there is an element of crossover between crime and Matt’s more traditional home ground of horror. Teenagers, all of them to some extent outsiders, taking trips into the country to a wild location filled with myths and legends of witchcraft and monsters – solid horror territory.

A group of parents looking for positive experiences for their children formed the Rangers as an activity group meeting regularly in a local hall and venturing into the countryside to experience the great outdoors. Scarclaw Fell adventure centre became the focus of their trips and over the years new members joined. By the late 1990s the older members had formed a tight group and would use the greater freedom of trips away to smoke, drink and explore the area, until tragedy tore the group apart.

Twenty years later Scott King’s popular podcast picks up the story and interviews with all of the key protagonists shed light onto events that have lain dormant and forgotten. The characters are well drawn with the changing perspective giving us fresh insight into each of them as they step forward to tell their part of the story, and around the edges of each of them is the shadow of a dark creature that looms over Scarclaw Fell. But was the monster conjured into life by their fears to stalk the fell or does it rather reside within them?

The writing feels fresh, the tension is palpable and I was hooked from the opening pages to the final revelation. Six Stories is quite simply a belting read that grabs you by your nerve endings and holds you tight in its pulsating grip. It is also now available as an audio book which isn’t normally my thing but on this occasion has genuine appeal with a full cast of 17 different voices. Keep an eye out for Matt Wesolwski, it feels like he’s another one to watch from the impressive Orenda stable.

In order to get the most from Seal Skin it probably helps to be comfortable with mystery. It draws strongly from legend and also from spiritual truth and as a result requires the reader to mine beneath the surface narrative to a deeper strata of meaning . Without that it is a novel that may prove a little strange, frustrating or mundane but once embraced there is a powerful and transformative message to be absorbed.

The story is based on the legend of the Selkie, mythical creatures who live as seals in the sea but can shed their skins and become humans on land. Seal Skin is a beautifully written retelling of the legend that carries ancient wisdom in an accessible read, but it is a story of tensions that is not easily understood by our modern rational minds which like the Selkie’s skin we must learn to set aside if we are to truly hear.

Donald is a loner in a tight and isolated fishing community, he has never really been comfortable either with himself or the people around him. One day he comes across the Selkie who have shed their seal skins and in human form dance among the rocks. He reacts instinctively hiding one of the skins and as the group return to the sea one is left behind unable to go home. Donald acts out of lust and frustration forcing himself upon the stricken Selkie then panics. Filled with fear and regret he takes her back to his home where a plan is hastily formed with his mother for a new human life.

It is a strange and violent start to a novel that immediately casts doubt in the mind of the reader, is there any way that this dreadful start can be resolved in a meaningful way? Rationally it can’t. There can be no way back for a man who has so appallingly assaulted an innocent and so what follows can only be understood from some other level, from a space in which grace can be both offered and accepted but not without cost to all concerned.

Mhairi, as the Selkie is later named, does what many spiritual traditions call all of us to do, she forgives and in doing so she transforms the people around her; but she does not forget. This is not a frivolous act, she truly lets go of her valid claim against Donald and the world that he has forced her into and though she has been wronged and she carries the enormous pain of mourning for the life she has lost, she serves her new community in a way that they cannot resist.

As the story unfolds no one can come into contact with such pure forgiveness and not themselves be changed by it. Donald becomes somebody that Mhairi can genuinely grow to love and in doing so he sets off ripples of his own as grace begins to flow. But do not expect a soppy ending, this is a story about love not romance and love costs. In the end there will be a reckoning, a price that has to be paid, and it is here that the true mystery of grace is revealed, if you can accept it.